So, I decided I'd switch from phone+broadband with Spark to a naked broadband connection with Orcon. Along the way, I also ported my home phone number to 2talk for VoIP.

The first cockup, to be fair, was somewhere between me and 2talk and Spark. Spark's antiquated billing system can't bill you if you don't have a phone number with them; even if you're naked, they still give you a phone number (which you can't use). Of course, I was totally unaware of this. So, when 2talk ported my phone number to themselves yesterday, Spark *also* disconnected my broadband connection. (Or maybe arranged for it to be disconnected... it still worked the following morning).

Now, Orcon can't *connect* because my line is already disconnected. Bizarre. Along the way, I get lies along the lines of there isn't a port available (Hello! You were going to connect me today... you surely had a port available for that) and we need to send a technician to the exchange (Hello! Do we live in some 3rd-world hellhole? Telecom/Chorus hasn't sent technicians to our exchange for years; it's all managed from Palmerston North) so it will take 2-10 days! (Jesus... it's like the NZ Post Office is still running the phones!) Actually, this is probably perfectly credible to the call centre people, who all sounded like they were in Manila.

Hint for anyone wanting to at least get straight answers: ask immediately to be put through to the "Escalations Team". But the bottom line is that everyone has to go through Chorus. Chorus, being a monopoly, apparently don't have SLAs in their contracts (apart from perhaps 2-10 days); all the ISP can do is request it to be done. Chorus can take their own sweet time to push the button to make the reconnection. So, now I'm waiting for Chorus to get round to sending me a text telling me when they're going to reconnect the line that was wrongly disconnected this morning.